the "Bildungsbürger"

I was happy that a colleague, Gregor Dotzauer from the Berlin Tagesspiegel, recently won the Alfred-Kerr-Prize for Literary Criticism. Happy because I have always been a fan of Kerr (and even of his grandson Philip who writes clever thrillers), and because I enjoy Dotzauer’s articles, at least the ones I can understand. Now here comes the puzzle: the jury decided that Dotzauer “strengt seine Leser auf beglückende Weise an” (“puts a joyful strain on the reader”). Typisch deutsch? I am afraid so.

If I were to write in that way – whether I brought joy to the reader or not – I would probably be sacked. It is almost certainly in my contract. Reason for dismissal (Kündigungsgrund): difficult texts that give readers a migraine.

But of course the Germans are right. We have to fight a constant running battle, a 100-years war, against dumbing down. It could be that the British (or rather English; the Scottish educational system still has oases of high culture and classroom rigour) surrendered to American influence: first came the television police melodramas, westerns and comics, then the comedies with recorded laughter, then the game shows and MTV and “reality” shows. It was infectious, the big and the little screen, so infectious that many young people stopped reading anything that lasted more than 45 minutes – the duration of a television drama before the advertising break. The fashionable explanation is that people stopped reading books and going to the theatre when the internet became popular. But I remember writing a book in 1985 – about the murder of a Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko – and the American publisher telling me, “We love the book, Roger, but there are too many Polish names in it! Too many Polish names beginning with the letter ‘P’”. I had to go through the text so that it wouldn’t confuse the American reader. Later they made me remove all the semi-colons. In those days it was the American rather than the British publishers that did the censoring. Nowadays it is the literary agent who tells you to “make things simple”.

Naturally, both the US and the British still have formidable intellectuals; the theatre hasn’t died; there are national debates about cultural issues.

Not ashamed to be serious

But there is nothing comparable to the German “Bildungsbürger”. In fact we cannot even translate it (“middle class intellectual”). There was a time – ending sometime in the 1950s – when the British valued book-learning, a broad cultural knowledge, as a way of transcending the class system. That has passed: social mobility does not come through books but rather skill at making (or, nowadays, not losing) money. The German “Bildungsbürger” by contrast is still alive and well. You can find him, or her, everywhere. In the theatre, mid-week, when no Englishman leaves his television set, you can hear serious analysis during the break. Because the German is not ashamed to be serious. And because theatres and opera houses are so well organised that you have time to talk, rather than fight for a glass of wine and a bretzel. Reading tours are a pleasure (providing Deutsche Bahn is functioning properly); Germans are willing to leave warm living rooms on a cold winter night to listen patiently to someone else’s words. In Britain, only television celebrities have a similar effect and even then they come only to autograph their memoirs (usually written by someone else). In Britain and the US, the pivotal figure is the agent who “sells” your book on the market. In Germany the central person in the production of a book is the “Lektor”, the editor, who is employed by the publishing house to genuinely understand your book. His main task is to make the author’s thoughts more clear, more accessible – but not to dumb down.

A way of understanding specifically German problems

The impact of the “Bildungsbürgertum” can best be seen in how Germany and Britain deal with their literary heritage. Britain was always proud of its television treatment of classical novels: the Forsythe Saga, by John Galsworthy for example. But television audiences grew tired of the slow pace and instead literary stories were made for the cinema – but only if they included a star who was recognised in Hollywood. German filmmakers on the other hand have always kept their German-ness, and have used classical books as a way of understanding specifically German problems; they form part of a dialogue with the local audience, rather than wrenching a story out of its context in an attempt to make it universal. There are two such films in German cinemas at the moment. One is Buddenbrooks, the Thomas Mann masterpiece. It is brilliant timing – the theme, … the building and the loss of a fortune over generations, fits into the national mood. And it is well-acted. Personally I prefer the television serial of Buddenbrooks from 1979, 11 episodes with every episode ending with a Dallas-style cliffhanger. I was a young correspondent in Bonn at the time and learned more about Germany from the Franz Peter Wirth adaption than from a hundred press conferences. And I ended up reading the book. Something similar is going on now: sales of Buddenbrooks have trebled. Would this happen anywhere else in the western world? I think not. The second adaption is of Effi Briest. German filmmakers have tackled the Fontane novel again and again. This time I was disappointed – I still remember too clearly Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 version, with Hanna Schygulla as a wild rebellious Effi. It is much more ironic, sharper than the current Effi Briest. But guess what: young German girls are again reading the book in the U-Bahn.

Making demands on the reader

Maybe it is typically German to be “anstrengend”, to make demands on the reader (and to give prizes for it!). But it is a real achievement to keep on reinventing one’s literary canon. This surely is the only country in the world that can feature on the front cover of its bestselling news magazine a picture of a critic tearing up a novel by Günter Grass. It is a sign that people care about their literature, their common culture, and are willing to talk about it without embarrassment.

Now that is something Germany could export in these times of crisis.